The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Planned Parenthood and one of its patients cannot sue South Carolina over its effort to deny funding to the group, reasoning that the relevant federal statute does not authorize such suits.

The vote was 6-3, with the court’s three liberal members in dissent.

In 2018, Gov. Henry McMaster of South Carolina, a Republican, ordered state officials to deny Medicaid funds to Planned Parenthood, saying that “payment of taxpayer funds to abortion clinics, for any purpose, results in the subsidy of abortion and the denial of the right to life.”

But abortion was mentioned only in passing in the decision, and the patient in the case had sought access to contraception, not an abortion.

Instead, the justices focused on whether the plaintiffs were entitled to sue to enforce part of the Medicaid law, which gives federal money to states to provide medical care for poor people.

Still, in shutting down such suits in federal court, the majority made it easier for states to deny funding to Planned Parenthood.Medicaid provides federal money to states, but it sets some conditions. One is that eligible participants may receive assistance from any provider qualified to perform the required services. At issue in the case was whether a patient could sue to enforce that provision and obtain Planned Parenthood services for medical treatment other than abortions.

Federal law prohibits the use of Medicaid funding for abortion except in life-threatening circumstances or in cases of rape or incest. But Planned Parenthood clinics in Charleston and Columbia provide services unrelated to abortion, including counseling, physical exams, contraception and screenings for cancer and sexually transmitted infections.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, said private suits to enforce federal statutes are rarely permissible and require clear congressional authorization.

“After all, the decision whether to let private plaintiffs enforce a new statutory right poses delicate questions of public policy,” he wrote, adding that those questions should be resolved by “the people’s elected representatives, not unelected judges.”

Gorsuch wrote that there are other ways to enforce the statute. The federal government can cut off Medicaid money, he wrote, and South Carolina has an administrative process in which medical providers can challenge their exclusion from the state’s Medicaid program.

In dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, said the law in question directly authorized the suit.

She added that Gorsuch’s proposed alternatives were unrealistic. “In practice,” she wrote, the federal government “rarely invokes its authority to withhold funding because doing so would inevitably harm the program’s beneficiaries.”

“Today’s decision is likely to result in tangible harm to real people,” she wrote. “It will strip those South Carolinians — and countless other Medicaid recipients around the country — of a deeply personal freedom: the ‘ability to decide who treats us at our most vulnerable.’”

A federal trial judge blocked the South Carolina directive, saying that it ran afoul of Medicaid’s requirement that patients may choose any qualified provider.

The litigation that followed was convoluted and circuitous, focusing largely on whether Medicaid’s provision created a right that individuals could enforce by filing lawsuits.

Roberts said the Court will issue its final opinions of the term on Friday, including several cases:

Birthright citizenship

The court took up the administration’s plea to narrow orders that have prevented the citizenship changes from taking effect anywhere in the U.S.

The issue before the justices is whether to limit the authority of judges to issue nationwide injunctions, which have plagued both Republican and Democratic administrations in the past 10 years.

At arguments last month, the court seemed intent on keeping a block on the citizenship restrictions while still looking for a way to scale back nationwide court orders. It was not clear what such a decision might look like, but a majority of the court expressed concerns about what would happen if the administration were allowed, even temporarily, to deny citizenship to children born to parents who are in the country illegally.

LGBTQ books

Parents in the Montgomery County school system, in suburban Washington, want to be able to pull their children out of lessons that use the storybooks, which the county added to the curriculum to better reflect the district’s diversity.

The school system at one point allowed parents to remove their children from those lessons, but then reversed course because it found the opt-out policy to be disruptive.

Louisiana district map

Lower courts have struck down two Louisiana congressional maps since 2022 and the justices are weighing whether to send state lawmakers back to the map-drawing board for a third time.

Online age verification

The court will also consider whether a Texas age verification law for online content measure infringes on the constitutional rights of adults as well.

The Free Speech Coalition, an adult-entertainment industry trade group, agrees that children shouldn’t be seeing pornography.

But it says the Texas law is written too broadly and wrongly affects adults by requiring them to submit personal identifying information online that is vulnerable to hacking or tracking.

This report includes information from the Associated Press.